Published 4:00 am, Friday, February 16, 1996

Most critically acclaimed films go through an awkward middle age on their way to classic status. This is especially the case if a film is influential. Twenty years pass, and audiences are so familiar with the imitators that the original no longer looks fresh or striking.

You might expect that to be the case with "Taxi Driver," which opens for a two-week run today at the Castro Theater (followed by a one-week run at the UC Berkeley.) But in fact it's as strong today as it was 20 years ago.

Part of the immediacy of "Taxi Driver" has nothing to do with its quality but with its personnel. It was made by people who turned out to be both talented and lucky. Two decades later most of the folks connected with "Taxi Driver" are significant show-biz names.

Director Martin Scorsese went on to make some of the best films of his generation (and some of the most disappointing films of the last couple of years). Cybill Shepherd -- who'd have thought? -- has a great career in television. Jodie Foster, for reasons only the Academy understands, has won two Oscars. Harvey Keitel has become the coolest thing in movies. And Robert De Niro is De Niro.

Then there's Albert Brooks. You might not even remember that Brooks was in "Taxi Driver." He plays a political aide working on a presidential campaign with fellow aide Shepherd.

Its deeply anarchic sensibility has kept "Taxi Driver" fresh all these years. Other screenwriters besides Paul Schrader have in

vented bizarre protagonists, and other directors have turned their cameras on the mean city streets. But the heart and soul of "Taxi Driver" are twisted in a way that can't be faked or copied.

It's a bizarre success story about how a sick young man finds his place in an equally sick world.

From the minute we meet Travis Bickle (De Niro) we know it's just a matter of time before he explodes. He's white and 26 years old. He's a compulsive diarist, a loner and an insomniac, and he has a military background. If he took an aptitude test, the results would come back: political assassin.

He takes a job driving a cab to keep busy, since he can't sleep anyway, and spends his nights driving through New York's slums and red-light districts. He seems impervious to what he encounters, but the opposite is true. He has no capacity to deflect. He just passively soaks it in.

He pours out his disgust in his diary -- and in one scene, to a presidential candidate, whom he drives to a rally. He rants about how the city needs a great rain to come and wash it clean. The beauty of it is, Travis is not just projecting his own twisted psyche. His surroundings are exactly as horrible as he thinks they are.

In a way he's like the environmentally ill character played by Julianne Moore in "Safe." He is getting very sick from something that really is out there, even if other people are immune.

"Taxi Driver" is about one guy's slide down a greased rope into psychosis and violence. He makes attempts at connection. He pursues the beautiful campaign worker (Shepherd) and has a memorable scene in which he asks advice of a senior cabbie (Peter Boyle). It's hard not to get a chill when, in the midst of a completely inarticulate interchange, De Niro says, "I wanna do something -- I got terrible things in my head."

The classic "Are you talking to me?" scene, in which Travis stands in front of the mirror packing heat, is as eerie and funny as ever. The irony is that no one is talking to him -- and that's his problem. Now he's pointing a gun, but at himself.

De Niro is dazzling in one of his signature roles. Foster, as a 12- year-old prostitute Travis sets out to save, is good, too -- hard-boiled yet very much a kid. And Keitel brings unexpected vulnerability to the role of her pimp.

Shepherd, who was trashed by critics 20 years ago, does just fine. That impassive, sardonic quality wasn't bad acting, after all. That's Shepherd's personality, and by now we've come to like it.

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